Fiendish Ingenuity

Ahoy! Been a while. I've been going through a bit of a scatterbrain stage of late, unable to focus on any particular project for too long before I have an idea for one of the others, so I have a lot of stuff that's almost finished.

The other day though I clocked a fantastic conversion by maxxev over on Tom's Boring Mordheim Forum and it sparked one of those "holy shit..." moments where you suddenly have five ideas all at once - one of which was, of course, shamelessly ripping off the original, hah. Turns out I had most of the parts already, and I managed to score a decent deal on the necessary Island of Blood bitz, so I began work immediately and now my very own Clan Skryre Warlock-Engineer riding his Doomchair is complete, along with a pair of Assistant Engineers one with a Lightning Projector/Wrench-claw(DHW), and the other wielding a Morning Star, Warplock Repeater(ie, brace of Warplock Pistols but you only have a handful of holstered pistol bitz left :P), Poison Wind Globes, and a Gasmuzzle. If some of those don't sound familiar, that's because they're based on my own version of Clan Skryre warband rules for Mordheim which should be available in the initial playtest version fairly soon if anyone else fancies a go.

Anyway, enough talky-talky, picture time:

The Doomchair doesn't have any rules of its own, it just looks awesome, though getting it to look the right combination of rickety and functional was an interesting experience. I'll be using it to represent a Warpfuelled Exoskeleton(Heavy Armour with +1S bonus).

Also on the workbench for these guys right now is an Overseer, three Globadiers, a Stormfiend-based Rat Ogre, and a Warpgrinder weapon team. Further updates may take a while, given..."events" in Scotland at the moment.

TTFN.

Alternative Mordheim Model Megalist

So, the Great Purge has finally begun. I think most of us had been expecting this for a while now, whether you liked AoS or not, but it's still a bit sad to see so many fantastic(and, admittedly, a few not so brilliant) models being dropped forever by GW. A lot of the Empire characters that are vanishing are ones I can remember drooling over back in the days where they were made of metal and I had to carefully choose which to spend my pocket money on, and even if the Bretonnian peasant plastic kits were really showing the age of their moulds, they remain some of the most characterful miniatures GW have ever made and formed the basis of many fantastic conversions.

That this is finally happening has spurred me to starting this post, which will by no means be completed when first published, I intend to keep adding to it over time, and suggestions in the comments are welcomed.

There are already a few "alternative models"-style blogposts and forum threads out there, for WHFB and Mordheim, and they can be great resources, but all the ones I've found tend to be quite all-encompassing, by which I mean they tend to include any model that could potentially be used for the game, whereas I am primarily concerned with finding models that fit the setting, ie they look like they belong in Mordheim/Warhammer's aesthetic. And that is what this list is intended as - as AoS proceeds we will doubtless lose more of the models that fit within Fantasy's traditional aesthetic in favour of the more bombastic modern style, so I intend to catalogue all the miniatures I can find which fit my own obviously subjective criteria for a "proper" Warhammer/Mordheim model. The list will be divided by faction and any visually-distinctive subfaction(models which require additional conversion work to meet the standard will be noted as such). It will eventually include every currently-sold model from whatever source(including GW/FW) that I can find which fits aforementioned subjective criteria. Obviously given the purging will likely continue, I would recommend you pick up any GW models on this list that haven't been repackaged for AoS sooner rather than later.

Before we begin a brief but sadly necessary aside which will not be discussed further; if you're reading this post and find yourself itching to inform everyone that third-party model makers who make miniatures which are visually compatible with GW's various IPs(which are themselves pastiches of historical peoples and events, folklore & mythology, and "borrowed" concepts from other creative works) are "leeches making a living from other people's ideas" or any variation on that theme, please don't, it's not a PoV I'm interested in hearing about and any such comments will be moderated.

A final special note; any models marked "AoW" are from the Avatars of War range - very nice models, but I would advise buying them from a third-party retailer rather than direct from the AoW website, as they can sometimes take an extremely long time to ship.

And so...

Lost and Found

Ahoy there. A brief update for now; work on models continues apace, pics will follow once they're at a stage I'm comfortable showing in public.

The point of this post is to share the image below in case anyone should find it useful; I've been trying to find a high resolution version of the Mordheim Map for a long while, but even with the help of someone over at TBMF the best that seemed to be available was an edited version with French tags pasted over the English ones - so I got annoyed and just sourced the scans from TC21 myself and ran it through GIMP to stitch the two pages together and tidy it up, heh.

All creatures great and small.

I had been intending to mostly work on my INQ28 stuff in recent weeks, but I seem to be more suggestible than I had thought, and a binge rewatch of Vikings over the holidays has it seems directed most of my modelling enthusiasm towards their two Warhammer incarnations.

Dwarfs are probably my second favourite part of Fantasy after the Empire, but their Mordheim outing has been stalled pretty much since I first picked out the models, when I decided I couldn't be arsed doing the required shortening work over other projects. I say required because while the Scibor and Avatars of War models are lovely, they're all too tall for my tastes, and so had to be reworked to bring them down to 20-ish mm to the eyes. Having done that for some of them now, it has the happy side-benefit of bringing them closer in appearance to the older "kneeless" Dwarfs I fell in love with as a kid.

The first five almost finished models are, left to right; Ranger, Hammerer, Thane, Hammerer, and Miner. I have another Warrior, two more Rangers, and an Engineer on the board at the moment based on more Scibor models, and the two Slayers are from AoW(but are proving a right fucking pig to convert given they're metal). A few individual shots(apologies for the blur):

The other Viking-esque force that's been occupying my attention of late are a band of Marauders from one of the Norse tribes. There's a fair few models in the works for these guys, but only a couple are pretty much complete, the first of which was a test model to see if I could make something decent out of the new Bloodreavers(probably the only thing to come out of AoS that's actually better than their Realhammer equivalents, although it still needed some help from the old Marauder Horsemen kit):

Most of my time on these guys though has been spent on one of the few new AoS models that's any good; Borg Jotunblod.

Mostly the conversion work is concerned with removing any obvious Khornate iconography and with making his armour look a bit more primitive. The full band will be based around seaborne Reavers, dedicated to the whole Pantheon with a slight overall bias towards Shornaal in its aspect as Loesh, the great serpent(as befits a band of sailors), and a few hints towards specific gods on some of the models.


A last wee addendum that's more of a recommendation than anything else, since really the only work done on the following model was gap-filling; I'd had a new idea for how to use my Nightmaw model that is presently doing duty as a Possessed in my Cult warband, which left them one short. Then I recalled the "Warper Alpha" miniature from Quantum Gothic, which actually had a nice resemblance to the old metal Possessed. I prefer the newer version seen in the Mordheim computer game myself, but now I get to have one of each, heh. If you're looking for a Possessed model, you could do much worse;